Tim LaHaye, an intellectual and popular leader of the evangelical movement whose 16 “Left Behind” novels sold tens of millions of copies, died Monday at age 90 in San Diego following a stroke last week, his ministry and his family said. The “Left Behind” novels, co-written with Jerry B. Jenkins, were enormously popular, crashing mainstream best-seller lists in the 1990s and the 2000s, which until then had been all but unheard of for Christian-themed fiction.

We’ve heard of those books, but we never read one. We were wondering what this has to do with our humble blog, so we continued scanning and learned:

[Jerry] Falwell, who died in 2007, credited LaHaye with having inspired him to found the Moral Majority in 1979.

[…]

LaHaye also founded San Diego Christian College, 12 Christian secondary schools and the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy at Falwell’s Liberty University in Virginia.

We didn’t know he had that kind of influence. But wait — here’s the big news:

Among the first departments at San Diego Christian College was the Institute for Creation Research, which branched out as an influential young-Earth creationist research organization in 1972.

Wow — the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is the fountainhead of young-earth creationist wisdom. That’s where ol’ Hambo began his career when he came here from Australia. And it was LaHaye who got the whole thing started. Maybe that’s common knowledge among creationists, but it was news to us.

There’s a lot more in the NBC article, but nothing else of interest to us. As far as we can determine, LaHaye had no connection with the Discovery Institute. They’ve never even mentioned him in any of their blog articles.

Anyway, that’s all we could find this evening. Make of it what you will.

20 responses to “Tim LaHaye, Creationist Prime Mover, Has Died”

You’re very, very fortunate: if you have any sense you’ll remain in that state of lucky innocence.

I was actually given a copy of the first one at a garage sale into which I’d witlessly strayed, little realizing that the person running it was a batdoodooloonitarian; she obviously thought that reading it would, like, save me in all directions. Since one of my day jobs is science fiction, I accepted; I assumed the book would be bad, but that reading it could be useful for, so to speak, research purposes.

I got through about a hundred pages before casting it aside to go and have a long hot shower. Not only is it abysmally written, it’s one of the most hate-filled texts I’ve come across, a tract promoting intolerance as if it were a virtue. If you’re Jewish, atheist, Muslim, agnostic, Jain, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or even one of the saner Protestants, the novel envisages the Chosen Bozoes, those favored by being snatched off to Heaven in the Rapture, cackling merrily as you and your kids suffer unnameable torments.

I came to the conclusion that the Chosen Bozoes were so loathsome that the unnameable torments were actually the better deal, but that’s by the by.

The worst part of it is that, like the garage-sale seller, LaHaye was probably not aware himself how unspeakably vile his book was. He probably assumed he was spreading the Lawd’s message of love.

So, while I sympathize with his family over their loss, tonight I’m all silver linings rather than clouds.

LaHaye is already duly eulogized over at AiG. It is touching to notice that he got to see and visit the Great Ark of Kentucky before his passing, no doubt the climax and highlight of his long life. (One envisions him praying, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy Ark, as rebuilt by Ken Ham.”)

LaHaye quote of the day: “I like to point out as lovingly as I can that evolution is an intellectual, philosophical fraud. We need to come back to the beginning, ‘God created the heavens and the earth.’”

So he founded a Christian college and a school at Liberty “University?” “The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.”
– Thomas Paine
“If [Falwell] had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox.” – Christopher Hitchens

Given that Christianity is based on revelation and Jesus, who is supposed to be God in the flesh, couldn’t predict his own return correctly, I wouldn’t be counting on any prophecy to be correct. Would you?

I wonder what the readers of the 22nd century will make of the writings of the creationists, intelligent-designer-ists, Arkeologists (that’s their own word), premillennial dispensationalists. The question will be, “Were there people who actually took it seriously?”

If memory serves correctly, he also had one of those scam tours to Israel to see the sites of the future “Apocalyptic End of the World” along with Hal Lindsey. Good Riddance! The world is better off without him!

TomS asks, “The question will be, ‘Were there people who actually took it seriously?'”
The Left Behind series will almost certainly fade into obscurity and be largely forgotten along with its author. Ken Ham, on the other hand, will leave behind some physical monuments when his time is up maybe 20 years from now.

Assuming the Ark doesn’t burn up or is left to decay, what will happen to the AiG “flagship” over the next fifty or hundred years?

The younger generation is, in Ham’s own words, “already gone” as far as his preferred religious ideas are concerned. What will become of the Ark in a future, more secularized America?

I tend to imagine that it will end up as an “attraction” akin to the bizarre Winchester Mystery House in California, which Widow Winchester constructed based on instructions from the spirit world. (Technically, this is equally true of the Ark.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House

In order words, the Ark will be a place people may visit purely for amusement, chuckling as they contemplate the wild eccentricities of some long-dead person.

Perhaps it could be turned into a museum devoted to “The Rise and Fall of American Fundamentalism, 1910-2030”.

Then people can indeed go there and wonder, ‘Were there people who actually took it seriously?’

It’s not that his books were weird, self centered and ugly, but that so many evangelicals bought them. I wonder if they actually read them or just looked at the pictures? Perhaps it was a status thing to have one or two paperback
copies at the office?